Disguised Next Generation Cherokee Captured On Film

Date 2000/5/12 0:00:00 | Topic: Cherokee

The guys over at Car & Truck News have done it again with a major scoop - one of their spies captured a convoy of disguised next-generation Cherokees (KJs) on the road and managed to grab his video camera and capture it on tape. Here's a snippet of what they saw:

The sides of the vehicle are also elaborately camouflaged. But this isn't the standard black vinyl covering, instead these sections have been padded to create a false profile. By viewing multiple frames the thickness of this padding is evident, the idea was to make the test mules resemble a Toyota RAV 4 or a Honda CRV.

Underneath all that padding, the KJ's side profile is much flatter. It's somewhere between the completely flat sides of the Dakar concept and the sides of the last Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle definitely has a tall, upright look. The rear of the vehicle appears to be similar to that of the Dakar concept.

The front clip is the most heavily disguised section. The front quarter panels have been heavily padded in an effort to hide Jeep Wrangler like front fenders. The hood is also stuffed in order to give it some curvature. Close analysis reveals what appears to be a similar to a Wrangler hood.

To disguise the nose, engineers stretched a black cover from the leading edge of the bumper back to the hood. Then they added a screen to mask the front grille. From the shot above you can see how far back the actual front is. If you look closely, you can also make out a distinctive Jeep seven slot grill.

James spotted a total of three KJ running in a convoy. Two of them were pulling U-Haul trailers (packed with computers no doubt), but the third one was hauling a big dual axle travel trailer. All tree used equalizer trailer hitches. He reports being "amazed by the lack of squat from the rear of the vehicles pulling the trailers. Whether this was due to the equalizer hitches or beefed up suspension, I couldn't say. They were stable though, and tracked very well." That big trailer seems to prove that the new 3.7 V6 is definitely up to the task of powering the KJ.